Federica Paddeu: To Convene or Not to Convene? The Future Status of the Articles on State Responsibility: Recent Developments (5/2019)

The paper reviews the most recent discussion in the Sixth Committee of the General Assembly of the future status of the Articles on State Responsibility, held in 2016. It then provides an overview and critique of the arguments for and against the convening of a diplomatic conference to negotiate a Treaty on State Responsibility.

This paper focuses – from a comparative and theoretical perspective – on the principles that govern the ascription of criminal responsibility to different parties involved in the commission of a crime. It has the twofold objective of introducing readers to the main doctrinal frameworks for the regulation of participation in crime in two well-known jurisdictions (England and Germany), as well as the theoretical foundations proposed for them, and of making the case for a reworked differentiated system based on separate doctrines of criminal participation formulated for three different participatory paradigms: acting through another, acting with another, and acting alongside another. It argues that the main flaws in existing doctrines of participation arise from a failure to recognise that it is inappropriate to apply them across the entire range of multi-party scenarios to which they are currently applied. However, the counsel of some defenders of unitary perpetrator systems – that we should give up on the very project of distinguishing between different modes of liability-ascription for parties to crime on account of the practical difficulties to which they all give rise – is a counsel of despair. Once the areas of application for the different participatory paradigms are appropriately demarcated, distinct sets of rules and principles for each of these paradigms enable the resolution of various disputed issues and seemingly intractable difficulties that beset this area of law.

Dominic de Cogan: Tax Law and State-Building: A Constitutional Introduction (7/2019)

The chapter examines why tax is so readily accepted as a critical part of constitutional history yet so rarely discussed in connection with the contemporary UK constitution. A convincing explanation is offered by Joseph Schumpeter, namely that there is an important difference between the establishment of a state and its normal operation thereafter. At the point of establishment, everything depends on success or failure in securing adequate and reliable revenues. Once the state is up and running, tax is generally subordinate to government, although the manner in which it is exacted may have important and enduring social consequences. There is therefore a point in time at which attention shifts from how tax constitutes the state to how it is constituted by the state.

According to the dominant narrative, the right of self-determination became relevant as a matter of law only after the 1960s or even only in the early 1970s. Reviving a seemingly forgotten episode in the legal history of self-determination, this article, however, shows that during the UN Security Council’s second year of operation, in 1947, the United Kingdom invoked the right of self-determination of another people, the Sudanese, as their legal entitlement, in its effort to counter Egyptian claims on the Sudan. Giving a strong voice to primary sources, this article narrates how British officials in the Sudan managed to promote the idea of Sudanese self-determination so successfully in London that the British Government, despite the UK’s strategic and colonial interests, ultimately invoked self-determination as part of its legal argumentation in the Security Council.